Industry News 03.21.07

SCI New Jersey Funeral Services Inc. filed a lawsuit earlier this month alleging that Wien, who sold his five funeral homes to the Texas-based company 10 years ago, violated a July 1996 agreement not to compete by opening Long Island-based Wien & Son Funeral Directors last year and joining the Fort Lee-based Eden Memorial Chapels earlier this year.

Although artist-designed urns and other objects are still a tiny fraction of the $11 billion death-care industry, as it is known, the gallery's opening - along with novelty items such as wind chimes with built-in cavities, pencils made from cremated remains (roughly 250 pencils per person), diamonds made from ash carbon and bird feeders designed to scatter ashes - reflect the shifting demographics of death and disposition.

... funeral directors must furnish a casket, cemetery costs, funeral services and transportation for family members. With the average price of a low-cost funeral totaling more than $3,000, that means funeral homes are often losing more than $1,000 on each indigent funeral, funeral directors say.

More than 13,000 holders of prepaid burial contracts that the Forest Hill funeral homes aren't honoring are waiting for resolution of their claims as several complex lawsuits grind their way through the courts.

It matters that things be taken care of at the first break of spring because this is where the stories of the tiny Palouse community of Mount Hope come to an end. The nearly 600 people buried here outnumber Mount Hope's living population roughly tenfold.